Blog Posts

I feel like the struggle of health, fitness and chronic illness isn’t discussed nearly enough. For 4 months at the end of last year I was sedentary. I was very low in B vitamins which made me extremely weak and tired- even more so than normal. My house had several floors and I couldn't battle the steep stairs anymore, unless I had to for an important appointment. Worse, my treadmill was downstairs so I couldn’t go work out unless I had someone to help me.
Having lost all the fitness I had built up at the rehabilitation centre, I'm now starting again from scratch. So far this week I’ve walk 35 minutes on the treadmill. I’m physically and mentally exhausted. When I was healthy it never occurred to me that people could struggle so much with movement and exercise. You can't really understand what it's like without experiencing it yourself.
Now...

Paraneoplastic took another person today. I didn't know the person well, but it hit me hard. It dredged up a lot of questions and emotions that I'd buried deep down.
Will the cancer come back? Will I have further neurological damage? What's my plan if I deteriorate again? No one knows what's going to happen, so all I can do is live my life and try not think about it. It's not the best coping mechanism but it's the only one I have. It's hard to deal with these open-ended questions.
The therapist at my rehabilitation center doesn't like "avoidance coping", where you ignore the stress and avoid dealing with the problem. But thinking about dying makes me spiral and puts me in a very dark place, so why should I deal with it? Why would I want to think about a topic that offers no relief in answers and always...

The lingering question of the day is if it’s hard to see others get better while you have a chronic illness. Honestly, the answer is both yes and no. Jealousy is such a complicated emotion. It can make you do and think things that you normally aren’t capable of. I feel jealousy, and I think that it’s a normal emotion to feel when others get better and you feel like you’re stuck in slow motion. But for me the feeling is temporary. I try to be self aware, and reflecting on my feeling usually means that jealousy gives way to being objectively happy for other people’s good fortune.
It happened to me recently. Someone with Paraneoplastic has been getting better and starting to live life again. At first I had negative, overwhelming thoughts that brought me to tears. Eventually I realized that my feelings weren’t really about this other person....